Yosemite History: Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect

Introduction

“Written in 1865 by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted when he served
briefly as one of the first Commissioners appointed to manage the grant of
the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove from Congress to the
State of California as a park, this Report offers one of the first systematic
expositions in the history of the Western world of the importance of contact
with wilderness for human well-being, the effect of beautiful scenery on
human perception, and the moral responsibility of democratic governments to
preserve regions of extraordinary natural beauty for the benefit of the whole
people. The Report also includes characteristically thoughtful suggestions
for managing the Park for human access with minimal harm to the natural
environment. Olmsted read the Report to his fellow Commissioners at a
meeting in the Yosemite Valley on August 9, 1865; ultimately intended for
presentation to the state legislature, it met with indifference or
hostility from other members of the Commission, and was quietly suppressed.
Olmsted himself left California for good at the end of 1865; he had arrived
there just a little more than two years before to assume responsibilities
as Superintendent for the Mariposa Mining Estate. Only in the twentieth
century has his Preliminary Report come to be widely recognized as one of
the most profound and original philosophical statements to emerge from the
American conservation movement.

“The original draft of the Preliminary Report is in the hand of Henry Perkins,
Olmsted’s secretary. It is accompanied here by a twentieth-century typed
transcipt. Pages 5 through 14 of the original document are missing; these are
believed to have contained the material represented in the second typed
transcript, taken from a letter to the New York Evening Post written by
Olmsted in 1868. Olmsted scholar Laura Wood Roper surmised that Olmsted had
removed that portion of the Report in order to incorporate it in the letter;
her explanation has been generally accepted by other scholars, and a
typescript of the relevant portion of the letter is accordingly included here
as part of the Report’s transcription.”

Bibliography

Jones, Holway R.
John Muir and the Sierra Club; The Battle for Yosemite, pp. 28-40.
San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965.

Olmsted, Frederick Law.
“Draft of Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove”
and “Letter on the Great American Park of the Yosemite.”
Typed transcriptions,
Frederick Law Olmsted Papers,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Roper, Laura Wood.
FLO: A Biography of Frederick Olmsted.
Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1973.
Roper discovered this long-suppressed report and first published it
October 1952 in
Landscape Architecture.

Stevenson, Elizabeth.
Park Maker: A Life of Frederick Law Olmsted.
New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977.